Google Details Its Plan to Destroy Itself With AI

The weirdest and scariest news to come out of Google's I/O conference is that it plans to destroy the web as we know it and somehow not kill itself in the process.

2024's IO keynote contained—surprise—plenty of AI announcements, with some genuinely useful gimmicks and features. But the news with the biggest impact on, well, everyone concerns Google's plans to turn its search engine into an AI portal. This could ruin anyone who uses Google search and anyone who relies on Google-sent traffic for their business, including Google itself.

"If you're in publisher SEO and the Google IO demos aren't making you consider a new career, you're probably not paying attention," says veteran tech journalist Ian Betteridge on Mastodon.

AI Answers

Imagine an old Yellow Pages, filled with ads and listings for every local business. Now imagine that one year, instead of sending out that doorstep-sized book, the Yellow Pages company posted a single card with its phone number, and when you called it, the company itself would come out and fix your pipes and do your taxes.

This metaphor falls down immediately because, unlike Google, which can just harvest the already-created knowledge from the web without paying for it, the Yellow Pages cannot just steal "plumbing" from plumbers. But the point is clear. We rely on Google as a middle person to connect our searches with the websites we want to find. This is such a valuable service to us that, in return, we accept advertising and the tracking of our activity on the web.

But what happens when Google takes all the web pages it indexes and, instead of directing us to those sites via search, uses their content just to feed its AI machine?

A disaster is what happens. Blogs, news sites, and other businesses all lose traffic. Nobody visits them because they get their answers right there on Google's home page.

You and I get worse results because how can we trust the answers? If we know anything about generative AI, it's that it just makes up answers that sound convincing. Even the examples that Google used in its own keynote were wrong: Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, spotted a real howler. When asked how to fix a jammed film camera advance lever, one of Google's AI answers was to open the camera and remove the film, which would utterly ruin the film and destroy all your photos.

"I can't believe Google duffed one of these again," said Patel on Threads.

Self Destruct

But the weirdest part is that, by replacing search with AI, as will surely happen eventually, Google stands to destroy its own business. Who will buy search ads when there are no search results? How will Google track your movements across the web if you no longer visit websites after searching?

Like it or not, Google is a huge part of the web's ecosystem. It's where most of us begin every sortie into the web. It provides businesses with customers and customers with answers. It sends traffic to news sites, which turn that traffic into revenue to pay their writers. If Google goes all-in on AI, which it seems likely to do, then that ecosystem is dead.

"[N]ow that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real-time, Google, at last, has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself," writes Casey Newton in his Platformer newsletter.

One wonders if Google can even get away with this. It's one thing to index the web and sell ads on those listings—the Yellow Pages model. It's quite another to scoop up all of the web's information and repackage it as your own using AI, especially when users cannot even trust those repackaged answers.

That's not to say that nothing good is coming of Google's AI plans, but the good stuff is all much lower level. For example, the upcoming Ask Photos with Gemini is a chatbot that can help you find a photo by asking it questions, which sounds extremely handy, even though it takes place in the cloud.

This is the odd quandary presented by AI. On the one hand, it can do some genuinely useful tasks, like finding photos, transcribing audio podcasts, and creating musical accompaniments for the song you're writing.

On the other hand, it's being used by shortsighted middle management to put people out of jobs and by companies like Google and OpenAI to appropriate the work of others without permission or compensation, all while using way more power and water than the world can spare.

Right now may be the time to switch away from Google search altogether. It's easy to change to a different search engine, and you might be surprised at how useful search can be these days without all of Google's cruft.